View 774 Thursday, May 16, 2013

Interesting. President Obama today told the press that he had never heard of the Treasury Inspector General report on IRS involvement in selective examinations of tax exempt status applications, given green light treatment to those professing “progressive” or “Social responsibility” goals, but putting primary hampers on those who mentioned “swollen government”, “too big government”, “tea party” and other conservative notions. http://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2013reports/201310053fr.pdf

The report wasn’t issued until May 14, but early copies were circulated well before that, and surely something of that importance – its public appearance caused the forced resignation of the Acting Director of the IRS – would have been known to any competent political advisors, and surely one of them would have leaked the information to the candidate. I understand the impetus to keep certain campaign knowledge from the candidate, and every political manager must deal with it: What the bosses don’t know can’t hurt them, they can deny it with good conscience. I don’t suppose there has ever been a political campaign without some such incidents. But once the campaign is over, and particularly when word of the shenanigan gets out to investigative reporters, there’s always a frantic scramble to cover things up, and at some point the top campaign managers must be told, and one of them has to tell the politician. The boss is, after all, the boss.

Now there was an Iron Law of Bureaucracy incentive in spades with big casino here: enemies of Big Government are by definition personal enemies of IRS bureaucrats. Pournelle’s Iron Law states that in every bureaucracy there will be two major factions, one dedicated to the goals for which the organization was formed (class room teachers who want the kids to learn as an easy example) and the other faction dedicated to the organization itself (teacher’s union executives); and the second faction always gains control of the organization. This is true of every bureaucracy, including the IRS, the FBI, the AFL-CIO, the General Services Administration, NASA, your local police force, your local fire department, the local PTA, and almost anything else you can think of, and if you think of a bureaucracy that doesn’t fit, wait a bit. So to any IRS bureaucrat organizations that say that the government is too big will be the enemy, and while Type One bureaucrats would resist the temptation to get out the red tape, Type Two bureaucrats would order a barrel full with some gusto.

Thus it’s hardly astonishing that people who want to control the growth of government would receive extra scrutiny from the IRS career civil servants. It’s even less astonishing that the political campaign workers (alas, with the gutting of the Hatch Act there is now considerable overlap) would simply smile and say nothing when they observed this sort of thing. But I would find it astonishing if no word of this reached the higher ranks of the President’s political campaign management within a year or more. Someone in the White House staff knew. The question is, how high up did the knowledge go? There is no evidence that Nixon knew everything or even very much about the machinations of Dean, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Colson in their “plumber squad” operations; the point is that he should have. He should have had in his top entourage at least one who would tell him what was being done in his name. Every CEO needs information sources other than the chain of command. Of course this President has little experience at management at any level.

I am not involved in breaking news stories, but as the facts become clear it’s important to understand them; there is more than politics involved here.

The original Hatch Act (upheld more than once by the Supreme Court) forbade civil service employees from engaging in political activities, and was usually interpreted as forbidding government workers who were “Hatched” from even being asked for political donations by anyone else. Of course the original theory of a civil services was to divorce it from politics while retaining responsibility to the public. That is a very narrow path to follow: if the public doesn’t like what a bureaucracy is doing, how can that be changed? The answer is supposed to be to change the political control, but if the bureaucrats are protected from political management stalemate takes place. This is easily observed in a great many places at all levels of government. An example is our usual example of a needless government activity, Department of Agriculture Inspectors who attend stage magic presentations to be sure that if the magician uses a rabbit in the performance, he has a Federal license to do so. There is probably no political appointee in the Department of Agriculture or anywhere else in the Federal Government who would defend this as a necessary activity during times of deficit financing; but the practice has continued for years, and likely will continue forever because there is no simple mechanism for ending it.

The Hatch Act worked fairly well for decades. The theory was that the civil service protections were strong, and accepting them required the civil servant to essentially give up political activity: you’re paid to implement policies, not to advocate for them. For younger readers this may seem like an astonishing statement, but that used to be the case, and every campaign manager knew it and acted accordingly.

Perhaps restoring the Hatch Act to its original intent and even strengthening it is order.

It’s time for lunch. Here’s something else to think about.

SUBJ: More on the the FBI’s Martha Stewart tactic

http://reason.com/blog/2013/05/14/fbi-well-decide-when-you-are-lying-to-us

Another example of the Iron Law at work. Most FBI special agents are precisely what they appear to be and what most of us grew up to expect of G-men; but the Iron Law continues to move in favor of gathering more power.

Cannibalism in Syria

Just in case anyone in your audience had any illusions about the war there.

http://world.time.com/2013/05/14/we-will-slaughter-all-of-them-an-interview-with-the-man-behind-the-syrian-atrocity-video/

http://world.time.com/2013/05/12/atrocities-will-be-televised-they-syrian-war-takes-a-turn-for-the-worse/

Of course, before one judges the man too harshly one must consider this fact about his victim:

"In an interview conducted via Skype in the early hours of May 14, al-Hamad explained to TIME what caused him to cut out the soldier’s organs: “We opened his cell phone, and I found a clip of a woman and her two daughters fully naked and he was humiliating them, and sticking a stick here and there.”

The upshot is that it appears that humans on both sides have been made into monsters by the war. And that raises a problem: When this orgy of killing, murder, and cannibalism finally subsides, the people who fought in this won’t instantly turn into civilized saints and go back to pumping gas or selling cars. No, I suspect that when the war in Syria is over the barbarized winners will make trouble elsewhere in the middle east as well. At this point I suspect it doesn’t matter who wins — whatever comes out is going to be horrible.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

It was, of course, inevitable.  George Washington warned us against getting involved in the territorial disputes of Europe, and from entering into entangling alliances. Our strategy of Containment required that we have alliances and that we become involved in territorial disputes; if you are going to contain communism, you have to contain it, and sometimes that involves sending Americans to Korea and Viet Nam. The problem with containment is that it is a form of attrition, and strategies of attrition work much better against democracies than against one-party systems. The rulers of a one-party system don’t feel the effects so very much, while the costs are shared in a democracy. After 1980 the US added a strategy of technology to accompany Containment, and it all worked extraordinarily well: in 1986 there was still evidence that we were headed for a CoDominium with the USSR surviving well into the 21st Century, but that didn’t happen. Once the Soviets understood that we would not disarm ourselves with “Arms Control” but were dedicated to neutralizing their most expensive weapons, things rapidly came apart over there. Arthur Koestler had long before said that a sufficient condition for the collapse of a totalitarian state would be the free exchange of ideas within it.  That might have been an overstatement but it contained much truth, and the small computer revolution faced the Soviet leadership with an impossible dilemma: forfeit the technology race, which was clearly military suicide (clear after the Falkland Islands War) or open up the society to free discussion. Gorbachev tried Glasnost while maintaining communism, the Old Guard tried to eject him by force, and the short insurrection that followed ended the USSR as such. The Seventy Years War aka the Cold War was ended.

Alas, the US had become addicted to projecting power overseas. The USSR, having won (by default when the US withdrew after Watergate) Viet Nam tried for Afghanistan; the result of that action was instructive to those who study war. It was not instructive to the leaders of the United States, who decided to exert the power of this Republic to restore the “legitimate” government of Kuwait after this artificial Kingdom was seized by Saddam Hussein. Then after 9/11 we intervened again into Middle Eastern affairs.  Quick Victory in Afghanistan was followed by an inane decade of “nation building”.  The Baathists were turned out in Iraq but we could find no one to take over, and the artificial of Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish Nationalists broke into pieces, with barbarism taking over in much of the area.

There have been other events in the Middle East, and US attempts to exert power in order to preserve civilization in them. They have not been notably successful. We projected power into the Balkans with the less than favorable results. A side result was to earn the thorough dislike of the Russians whose long history of dedication to Slavic interests seems to have escaped the geniuses of the State Department. We intervened in Egypt and in Libya. In all cases we didn’t do much: the lesson of Iraq was that we couldn’t afford to exert the power of the republic. The cost was too high. We do not have a generation of soldiers to send overseas.  But of course that was predictable.

Stephen Vincent Benet was a pacifist. His pacifism was shaken by Hitler and World War II, and he wrote in intellectual defense of opposing Germany. He did not live to see the peace after the war.

His view was that war never led to good results. This is not true, and he realized it before he died, but his vision of the consequences of war was never one of rosy optimism. There may be reasons to seek out and destroy dragons, but such actions have consequences. Sometimes it no longer matters much who wins.  Here is Benet on war, published in 1935.

Nightmare With Angels

An angel came to me and stood by my bedside,
Remarking in a professional-historical-economic and  irritated voice,
"If the Romans had only invented a decent explosion-engine!
Not even the best, not even a Ford V-8
But, say, a Model-T or even an early Napier,
They’d have built good enough roads for it (they knew how to build roads)
From Cape Wrath to Cape St. Vincent, Susa, Babylon and Moscow.
And the motorized legions never would have fallen,
And Peace, in the shape of a giant eagle, would brood over the entire Western World!"

He changed his expression, looking now like a combination of
Gilbert Murray, Hilaire Belloc,
and a dozen other scientists, writers,  and prophets,
And continued, in angelic tones,
"If the Greeks had known how to cooperate, if there’d never  been a Reformation,
If Sparta had not been Sparta, and the Church had been the Church  of the saints,
The Argive peace like a free-blooming olive-tree, the peace of Christ (who loved peace)
like a great, beautiful vine enwrapping the spinning earth!

Take it nearer home," he said.
Take these Mayans and their star-clocks, their carvings and their  great cities.
Who sacked them out of their cities, drowned the cities with a   green jungle?
A plague? A change of climate? A queer migration?
Certainly they were skillful, certainly they created.
And in Tenochtitlan, the dark obsidian knife and the smoking heart on 
  the stone but a fair city,
And the Incas had it worked out beautifully til Pizarro smashed them.
The collectivist state was there, and the ladies very agreeable.
They lacked steel, alphabet, and gunpowder
  and they had to get  married when the government said so.
They also lacked unemployment and overproduction.
For that matter," he said, "take the Cro-Magnons,
The fellows with the big skills, the handsome folk, the excellent
  scribers of mammoths,
Physical gods and yet with sensitive brain (they drew the fine, running reindeer).
What stopped them? What kept us all from being Apollos and Aphrodites
Only with a new taste to the nectar,
The laughing gods, not the cruel, the gods of song, not of war?
Supposing Aurelius, Confucious, Napoleon, Plato, Gautama, Alexander –
Just to name half a dozen –
Had ever realized and stabilized the full dream?
How long, O Lord God in the highest? How long, what now, perturbed spirit?"

He turned blue at the wingtips and disappeared as another angel approached me.
This one was quietly but appropriately dressed in cellophane, synthetic rubber and stainless steel,
But his mask was the blind mask of Ares, snouted for gasmasks.
He was neither soldier, sailor, farmer, dictator, nor munitions-manufacturer.
Nor did he have much conversation, except to say,
"You will not be saved by General Motors or the prefabricated house.
You will not be saved by dialectic materialism or the Lambeth Conference.
You will not be saved by Vitamin D or the expanding universe.
In Fact, you will not be saved."
In his hand was a woven, wire basket, full of seeds, small metallic and shining like the seeds of portulaca;
Where he sowed them, the green vine withered, and the smoke and armies sprang up.

Stephen Vincent Benet

As I expect all of you know, I am no pacifist; but I am a student of history. And when we send our armies out to remake the world, I cannot help but be reminded of Ortega y Gasset, and his tale of the story of Napoleon reviewing his troops. “See my soldiers, how splendid, how the light glistens on their bayonets.”  To which Talleyrand replied, “Sire you can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it.” Once the bayonets have destroyed the firm seat, restoring a new one may be more difficult than supposed. There was a good reason for John Quincy Adams to say that America is the friend of liberty everywhere but the guardian only of our own. He understood that he who defends everything defends nothing, and those who undertake to defend the rights of all the people in the world may end by finding the coast was their own liberty. We can break things and kill people. Rebuilding is a more difficult job, and we learned the wrong lesson from our accomplishments with Germany and Japan after World War Two. We cannot rescue everyone and when we find what the cost has been, who rescues us? It is no small thing to be a free society and defend that freedom. The thing about defending our own liberty is that it generally increases our power. When we go out to slay foreign dragons, the cost can be far greater than we think – and we may not be the ones who pay it.

Mike Flynn calls my attention to this:

New system could predict solar flares, give advance warning

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Researchers may have discovered a new method to predict solar flares more than a day before they occur, providing advance warning to help protect satellites, power grids and astronauts from potentially dangerous radiation.

The system works by measuring differences in gamma radiation emitted when atoms in radioactive elements "decay," or lose energy. This rate of decay is widely believed to be constant, but recent findings challenge that long-accepted rule.

The new detection technique is based on a hypothesis that radioactive decay rates are influenced by solar activity, possibly streams of subatomic particles called solar neutrinos. This influence can wax and wane due to seasonal changes in the Earth’s distance from the sun and also during solar flares, according to the hypothesis, which is supported with data published in a dozen research papers since it was proposed in 2006, said Ephraim Fischbach, a Purdue University professor of physics.

http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2012/Q3/new-system-could-predict-solar-flares,-give-advance-warning.html

Of course the notion of variable decay rates in radioactive substances is startling to those of us brought up on the notion that it is invariable. So we have neutrinos, which no one can find, changing the decay rates that can’t be changed; but if all that works we may be able to have some advance warning of events that may destroy our civilization. A brave new world.

And to end the day on a cheerful note, our galaxy won’t collide with Andromeda for about a billion years. But here’s the picture of the day.

Galaxy Collisions: Simulation vs Observations, 

Jerry

APOD: 2013 May 14 – Galaxy Collisions: Simulation vs Observations:

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130514.html

It is very cool.

Ed

View 775 Monday, Thursday, May 09, 2013

Today’s LA Times has two education essays. One is “Closing the Education Gap” by Michele Siqeiros. It’s on the editorial page, and it’s a pretty standard exhortation . “The state must develop a comprehensive strategy for public K-12 education, adult education and higher education systems for addressing remedial education.” We have to spend more money, and we have to pick up where the schools have left off or are leaving off, etc. etc.

Apparently they admit that the schools are awful and probably unfixable so we need to set up a second education system for remedial education. That will certainly hire a lot of teachers.  It beats the Mexico system where a bunch of education students in one of the colonies are holding 8 state policemen hostage demanding that they all be employed on graduation.  I hope I am imagining having read that is happening, and even more I hope it was in Mexico and not somewhere in the US. So we need to fix the system with remedial education at all levels.  Apparently we just write off the enormous sums being spent on the present failing system,.

The second essay isn’t supposed to be an essay but a front page story. My edition of the paper has it as “A Milder Way to Fight Defiance” by Teresa Watenade http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/12/local/la-me-adv-lausd-discipline-20130513 and it appears above the fold on page one.

“Damien Valentine knows painfully well about a national phenomenon that is imperiling the academic achievement of minority students, particularly African Americans like himself: the pervasive and disproportionate use of suspensions from school for mouthing off and other acts of defiance.

The Manual Arts Senior High School sophomore has been suspended several times beginning in seventh grade, when he was sent home for a day and a half for refusing to change his seat because he was talking. He said the suspensions never helped him learn to control his behavior but only made him fall further behind.

"Getting suspended doesn’t solve anything," Valentine said. "It just ruins the rest of the day and keeps you behind."

But Valentine, who likes chemistry and wants to be a doctor, is determined to change school discipline practices. He has joined a Los Angeles County-wide effort to push a landmark proposal by school board President Monica Garcia that would make L.A. Unified the first school district in California to ban suspensions for willful defiance.”

The rest is about the same. And of course it’s another attack on the notion of schools as places of opportunity to get an education. They’re not that: a school is a place you are entitled to be at, whether you belong there or not, whether you behave yourself or not, whether you are capable of learning or not; and Damien Valentine has as much right to be there, and to talk in class, and defy the teachers, and make it impossible for those around him actually learn something, as anyone else. The fact that Damien’s presence is one reason for the failure of the schools doesn’t seem to impress anyone.

The answer it seems is “restorative justice” in which the teacher spends a lot of time “working with” Damien and those like him. Teachers “exchange letters” with disruptive students, “each taking some blame and pledging to better cooperate.” Of course time spent with Damien and his ilk is taken from the students who just want to learn and who don’t insist on their right to be disruptive, and don’t insist on “restorative justice” if they are disciplined.

So long as the voodoo “education science” insists on transferring educational resources from those who can and want to learn, to Damien and others who are more concerned with their rights than their education, and who render themselves pretty well impervious to actual education, we are never going to have schools in which all but a very few learn to read, write, cipher, learn some civics, and generally have an educational foundation that helps them go out and find jobs or go to college. We need remedial education, not for Damien, but for those that Damien robbed of the chance to get an education in the regular system. 

We must pour more money into the schools so that there can be restorative justice for Damien and others like him; we must no have enforcement of discipline and teacher control of the classroom; and of course it is senseless to question what the results of all this will be. We don’t need to. We can see what the results are.

One result is increased class rigidity. There are those who go to good schools with hard discipline – they are the children of the rich, and a favored few who manage on some sort of charity or scholarship. There are those who live in the parts of town where the students tend not to talk in class and tell the teacher to shut up when they are disciplined, and who manage to get through a public school, so that they can now go to a college where they acquire a lifetime debt. And those whose parents can pay or work the system so that the kids can graduate without those crushing debts.

For a while it looked as if we were working on a system that paid attention to The Bell Curve and did trend toward a meritocracy; but now apparently we are to dismantle all that. The way to be sure that no child is left behind is to make sure that only the rich kids get ahead. The rest are to be subjected to Damien Valentine, who was wronged by the system and must be rendered restorative justice; and the teacher needs to spend time exchanging letters with those who won’t accept classroom discipline, or else must support the union which protects her from that stuff, and whatever the union’s faults it at least doesn’t make her spend her scarce free time in T-groups and sensitivity training, but can just get on with teaching those who want to learn. Given those choices I’d support the union. I don’t want to exchange letters with Damien. But Damien wants to be a doctor, and all those suspensions “never helped him learn to control his behavior but only made him fall further behind”, and he wants to be a doctor, and surely there are patients who deserve him?  So it is time for retributive justice.

The well disciplined kids who want to learn might actually learn something: but they better want it pretty badly, because the teacher is busy apologizing for disciplining the defiant.

Apologies for the rant. I presume that those who are in this crazy movement really believe the voodoo social science garbage they have been fed. Alas, I suspect that some know perfectly well what they are doing. If teachers are evaluated on actual results – how many students can actually do calculus when they graduate high school – then a lot of teachers aren’t going to be given the bright students to work with. But that’s another story for another time. Apologies for the rant. But not many.

If you want your kids to get ahead, learn about the Kahn Academy lectures, and learn more about Art Robinson’s education programs. Make sure they can all read, and by read I mean read anything including nonsense words like montheoretics and polydodmanite by the time they are in second grade. If they can’t read those words they can’t read. And note that they won’t know the meaning. Learning the meanings of words is important, but first you need to be able to READ words you have never seen before. If you want to be sure of it all, start them at age five on Mrs. Pournelle’s Reading Program http://www.readingtlc.com/. But it’s your job: don’t rely on the school system, because the goal of the schools is retributive justice, whatever that is, not teaching the kids anything at all.

I’ll have the California Sixth Grade Reader ready as an eBook shortly. It will help; the notion is to show what all California sixth graders were expected to read in 1914 – and with luck get out 10^th graders up to that level. But for your kids, you’d best be able to get them up to that level in 5^th grade. Which you can do, you know. Our modern protoplasm isn’t inferior to that of rural Florida or California back in the days of World War One…

The pledge drive ended reasonably well. For those who don’t know what that is, this place operates on the Public Radio model. It’s free but it needs to be supported if it’s going to stay in business. I run my pledge drives when KUSC the LA Classical Music station runs theirs. I don’t bug you about money much except at those times. The drive is ending, and thanks to those who subscribed or renewed. If you haven’t subscribed yet, this would be a great time to do it; and if you haven’t renewed in a while, it is never too late. And that’s enough about money for a while.

View 773 Thursday, May 09, 2013

Pledge week continues. This journal operates on the Public Radio model – it is free to all, but it will continue only so long as enough people subscribe. If you have not subscribed, this would be a great time to do it. We encourage you to become a patron of this place of rational discussion. It is also a daybook. If you have subscribed but have not renewed in a while, this would be a good time to do that. Since this is a Public Radio model site, I hold periodic pledge drives. I time them according to the pledge drives of KUSC, the Los Angeles good music station. They’re having their Spring drive now which is why you are seeing this. Normally I don’t pound on you with exhortations.

And thanks to all those who have already responded to this Spring pledge drive, both with new subscriptions and renewal of older ones.

Discussion of the Benghazi Incident in which the American Consulate in Benghazi was left hung out to dry in the face of a major terrorist attack over a period of some ten hours resulted in the deaths of four Americans including the US Ambassador to the newly “liberated” Libya continues without much result. For reasons not yet revealed, the US Ambassador to the United Nations went on national television five times with the story that the Benghazi Incident was a general uprising in reaction to an obscure anti-Prophet video posted on You tube. This supposedly erupted into a spontaneous demonstration which grew into an actual attack by mortars and other heavy weapons. Various US responses including sending in a military reaction team to secure the Benghazi airport and conduct an evacuation of US personnel were contemplated, and at one point a team was ready to depart from Tripoli when it was told to stand down. We do not know who gave the order to stand down – either who was directly responsible for conveying the order, or who originated it. Normally the US military is more clear in defining its chain of command.

The US State Department second in command in Libya (a career Foreign Service Officer who was in Tripoli) was told by the Ambassador on the telephone that the Consulate in Benghazi (and the Ambassador personally) was under armed attack. There was no mention of a video or of any spontaneous demonstration. He has since been demoted from second in command to a desk officer. No explanation of this has been published.

The Congress is the Grand Inquest of the Nation, and it is supposed to determine why extraordinary events happen. Such inquiries can be used as political weapons, but that is not their purpose. One would think that both political parties would be interested in knowing how such a thing could happen and what the US, with the world’s most powerful military establishment, might do for the future. Perhaps a company of airborne troops on ready alert in each major theater? That might be overly expensive. Still we have this greatly powerful military – surely that confers some capabilities? We have carrier groups. We have various air weapons. Has no one given any thought to such matters?

And for the record, the President left the scene at 5 PM with the instruction to the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State to “do what you have to do”, which I would have read as a blank check to include anything up to a nuclear weapons response. One can understand that a President with no military experience might turn the matter over to the Department of War (well, we call it defense now). It may be that he simply went back to the domestic quarters of the White House having left the matter in what he thought was good hands with full power to deal with it.

What happened was that nothing happened. No rescue units were sent, no airplanes were sent to buzz the area, no tankers were sent to stand by to refuel any fighters that might be sent; there not only was no single integrated operational plan (although one might think that on the anniversary of 9/11 there might be some reason to have some active forces on ready alert), there don’t seem to have been any plans at all for dealing with major incidents in Northern Africa – an area that is still volatile.

Is that worth discussion? Are operational plans being formed now? Have any units been designated as standby for alert in case of a repeat incident? If so I don’t know of any. It all seems very odd.

In past times here wasn’t a lot of choice. Technology dictated that we would do nothing but react to incidents of this sort although I seem to recall that we had contingency plans on how we could react swiftly – it was the lack of any real operational plan that led to the developments in the early days of the Korean War with the defeat of Task Force Smith and the near disaster when the Pusan Perimeter was threatened. MacArthur and the Marines saved us at Inchon, but with that came a determination that we would be more ready in future. Of course that is a long time ago and few will remember those times.

The Iwo Jima class helicopter carriers with a battalion of Marines aboard were designed to be the ready force available for brush fire wars and general world peace keeping. They came about due to a number of strategic theory papers published in the 1950’s: a way to project a fair amount of force in a reasonable time. They were built and in use in the last part of the 20th Century, and were quite effective. Over time they were sold off and scrapped, supposedly replaced with more effective systems. Perhaps so but has a couple of Iwo Jima class ships been cruising the Mediterranean the Benghazi incident would not have happened. Of course those ships were not cheap and keeping operational level of troops on alert is expensive, but if we have goals requiring the projection of force we need to have forces to project.

Perhaps we need to rethink the need for swift reaction forces for the future with the technologies available to us now. They would be useful for either a Republic or a Competent Empire.

It has been a while since I gave serious thought to these matters; but it is time someone did.

Subject: space shuttle main computers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AP-101

They required a cold plate to keep from burning up. Brute force, the flower of 1970′s tech. 24 layer printed circuit boards etc.

Phil

Even more primitive than I remembered.

IBM_AP-101

You missed this ( or at least didn’t point it out ) in the link about the space shuttle’s computer.

"The shuttle software was written in HAL/S, a special-purpose high-level language."

Arthur C. Clarke, where are you?

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL."

Pete

Peter Wityk

View 773 Tuesday, May 07, 2013

I’m slowly recovering from whatever it was that bit me.

I am still reading The Static Universe. It states that there are QUASARS with measurable proper motion, but whose red shift distance places them so far away that the motion we see and measure has to be orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light. That seems inconsistent with the General Theory of Relativity on which the whole notion of red shift as the proper measure of distance to the objects is based. There are other observations totally at odds with the Standard Cosmology. I am not so familiar with the literature on Cosmology, but if this book is at all correct, the Standard Theory has been falsified. The Expanding Universe as we were taught it in high school is not correct, and we have not the foggiest notion of how far away a number of cosmological objects are; which means we do not have to accept the Standard Theory with its postulated (but not observed) Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and mega-massive Black Holes. Indeed, we really don’t know a lot about the universe beyond a few hundred lightyears. We have a scientific consensus and a peer review group that accepts the Standard Theory and discourages publications of observations that seem to contradict it, but in fact the consensus is not based on the preponderance of the observed data.

Which sounds a lot like the Consensus Theory of Climate Change.

‘Cosmologists’ are to astronomers as ‘educators’ are to teachers, one finds.

I’m deeply suspicious of anything beyond the most basic, coarse-grained principles of quantum mechanics which we’re fairly sure we sort of understand at a superficial level of detail. As far as I can tell, the rest is pretty much all supposition based on assumptions about an unscientifically-small number of actual data-points.

—-

Roland Dobbins

Richard Feynman insisted that no one, including him, understood Quantum ElectroDynamics. He could teach you how to do quantum calculations, and to make theories that could be verified by experiment, but he could not tell you how to understand it. What he could do was look carefully at observations. He was careful to point out that Newton never understood gravity, and neither do we, but Newton could generate hypotheses from observations. Now Feynman was addicted to data and observations, and to the best of my knowledge pretty thoroughly accepted the operational philosophy of science,

We have this from The Meaning of Everything:

It was thought in the Middle Ages that people simply make many observations, and the observations themselves suggest laws. But it does not work that way. It takes much more imagination than that. So the next thing we have to talk about is where the new ideas come from. Actually, it does not make any difference, as long as they come. We have a way of checking whether an idea is correct that has nothing to do with where it came from. We simply test it against observation. So in science we are not interested in where an idea comes from.

Richard Feynman

Feynman had little good to say about philosophy, but I find that paragraph more valuable than a semester I spent studying logical positivism under Gustav Bergmann. When I began as an undergraduate I thought I was a logical positivist, until I learned what that meant. Philosophy of Science under Bergmann was an important experience.  I suppose I came away as an adherent of Karl Popper, but that’s a different story.  I did find Bergmann a refreshing antidote to the unrelenting behaviorism of the University of Iowa Psychology Department.

Re: Static Universe

There are a few points to be made on this subject, in my opinion.

The first is that the anomaly in the local area around the Milky Way can be explained by the fact that the Local Group is gravitationally bound. Also, in any system such as this there are bound to be random motions that have nothing to do with the grand scheme; orbital velocities of stars in the Galactic disk are fairly uniform but there are random variations, for example.

The expansion hypothesis is supported at large distances by data from type Ia supernovae (I think that’s right) which are rather uniform standard candles for reasons connected with the basic physics of the supernovae themselves.

The equations of general relativity pretty well demand either a contracting or an expanding universe; the only way to get around this is to introduce a fudge factor (famously known as the cosmological constant) which has to be set to ridiculous precision (120+ significant figures) at an early period of the Universe in order to leave us with the universe we are actually in. Either that, or general relativity is wrong; but there is rather a lot of evidence for relativity and very little against.

Finally, the Hipparcos mission has the primary purpose of determining positions and parallaxes for millions of stars. The precision is high enough that parallax measurements as a yardstick can be pushed out a long way; IIRC the figure is about 500 light years. Useful, because Polaris is closer than that.

Regards,

Ian Campbell

Yes: the extension of parallax methods of determining distance to a Cepheid variable has made it possible to determine accuracies out to to other galaxies in the Local Group by giving a better measure of the distances to a given Cepheid well beyond the limits of parallax measurements. Unfortunately the red shift method of determining distances doesn’t work in that region, as I understand it.

As to the evidence for and against relativity theory, the major ‘against’ is its complexity. Beckmann asserted that his entailed aether could explain all the observations with far simpler math and fewer assumptions. Starting with observed data and generating a new set of theories is of course very difficult, and may never happen.

Expanding Universe

Jerry,

The reason the Hubble shift was assumed to be a Doppler shift is that nobody had a plausible alternative explanation. This assumption was based on the theory that space was a perfect vacuum. It isn’t. Quantum Mechanics predicts "virtual" particles appearing and being annihilated almost instantly. This is experimentally demonstrated by the Casimir effect. Light slows down in a dense (non-vacuum) medium. This implies an energy loss – the red shift. Note also that there is no known way to measure the velocity of light from a distant object.

Regards,

Roy

Roy Lofquist

Ratcliffe’s The Static Universe makes that point: there is no such thing as a vacuum. I don’t think he questions the absolute invariance of the speed of light in a vacuum, but since there is no vacuum… Some Quasars have enormous red shift yet they have detectable proper motion. If we have no real idea of the size of the visible universe… Well, it’s something to think about. But all observed red shifts cannot be a simple Doppler effect of expansion.

re: cosmology

Despite it’s name, astrophysics is barely a science, or more accurately, very little of it has the same reliability as physics.

The core problem is the dearth of direct observation and the small size of the observation database.

Therefore Astrophysicists have to:

1) rely on a lot of second-hand data

2) assume that conditions which apply in the Solar system also apply everywhere else.

2) is further compounded by the scarcity of direct observation even within the Solar system.

So most of what’s presented as knowledge about the universe is actually but speculation, not groundless speculation but speculation still.

Almost every time we send a probe to a new part of the Solar system, we discover that things there are different, sometimes dramatically, from what was until then the accepted truth.

If Earth-based observation gives such unreliable results for objects that are only a few AU’s away from us, how can we assume that our hypotheses about objects that are even a few parsecs away actually describe what’s there?

My favorite example is the Sun: it’s supposed to be fueled by H-H fusion, yet it doesn’t seem to be hot enough for it to happen. The cold, hard truth is that astrophysicists are telling us it works on handwavium. It’s just 1AU away but we have no idea of what really happens inside.

Similarly, if dark matter had been invented in an sf book, there’d be flame wars about whether it’s handwavium or unobtainium.

It’s not very important as actual discoveries are made, like extrasolar planets, and faulty theories about galaxies millions of light-years away won’t kill anybody – not before someone invents a really good warp drive anyway!

What really irks me is this acceptance of speculation as solid science blurs the general public’s understanding of what constitutes a proven scientific theory, something you can base important decisions on, and what is mere opinion – climate is what comes to mind here…

Best Regards,

Jean-Louis Beaufils,

Paris

Some random thoughts:

As I recollect, Fr. Lemaitre derived the expanding universe from the field equations for general relativity. DeSitter space was unstable, but Einstein cooked the books with the Cosmological Constant simply in order to maintain a steady state universe. Nevertheless, it still moved, and Einstein was eventually convinced. In any case, Lemaitre predicted the redshift and the cosmic background radiation. Hubble discovered the former before Lemaitre’s paper had been translated into English (and the English translation was edited to omit the prediction). News of the discovery of the latter was delivered to Lemaitre on his deathbed.

Somewhere along the line, at a conference in California – it may have been one of the Solvay conferences – Fred Hoyle noticed Fr. Lemaitre enter the auditorium, nudged the man next to him and said, "Here comes the big bang man." A legend was born. He meant the term as a put-down, because the idea of the universe having a beginning offended his beliefs; but he and Lemaitre became friends during a road trip to meet Hubble and other American astronomers.

There is a strange parallel between using apparent redshift to estimate galactic distances and the way the medievals used brightness to estimate stellar distances. The dimmer and smaller the star, they farther off they were. But it turned out that some stars were just dimmer than others, and the apparent diameters were artifacts of atmospheric aberration. It’s quite possible redshift is likewise due in part to expansion and in part to other factors.

It’s not too strange that locally we find both red and blue shifts. Locally, stars are whirling around the galactic center, and it seems likely that the Local Group is likewise moving locally due to gravitational attraction among galaxies. So the general motion will be more evident farther away, much as the flow of a river will be more evident looking at the river as a whole rather than the whorls and eddies in the immediate vicinity.

I also wonder because the more distant objects are as they were millions of years ago, not as they are now. So might they be moving faster simply because the universe was expanding faster in the distant past? But surely this is known and corrected for.

Of course, I’m no big fat expert.

Mike Flynn

All of which gives us quite enough to think about. I suppose I need to come out of the Cosmic realm and back to the society we live in.

I would be astonished if there were one single explanation for redshift. But if redshift is our best way to determine distance to an observed very distant object, we need to know when and how to rely on it.

Light from a million lighyears distance travels through a lot of space. How much of that is empty? Sir Fred Hoyle had his ideas on that. And he certainly didn’t believe in the Big Bang. From what I recall of Feynman he would have been delighted to find that everything we knew about Cosmology was wrong…

If you’re looking for a good book to recommend to a young reader, try Starswarm. Adults like it too…

View 772 Friday, May 03, 2013

A long time ago when computers were not very reliable, and networking them was tricky at best, I developed a principle of troubleshooting: ninety percent of the time it’s a cable. This morning Roberta’s computer told her she wasn’t connected to a network. It had a box to click for fixing the problem. She hadn’t encountered that message before, and rather than respond to it told me.

I had a quick look, and it was in fact the Microsoft Windows message, and she was in fact not connected to our internal network. I looked at the Ethernet switch for her system, and the power on light was lit but nothing was blinking. I found a spare D-Link gigabit switch, but no power supply for it; I tried it with the old power supply, the power on light came on, but when I connected the cables to the printer and to the main Ethernet switch upstairs, nothing happened.

I went back to finish my coffee, then took a working gigabyte switch from the Apple Net Book Pro I used for Skype and Internet conferencing, along with its power supply, and went downstairs and connected that switch to Roberta’s system. This time I got some lights blinking but the connection wasn’t reliable, at which point I remembered Pournelle’s first principle of troubleshooting and replaced the cable from her system to the switch box. Lo!, all was well. She’s connected back to the system, and all is well.

Meanwhile upstairs I tried to get the switch I’d replaced to work with the Mac Book Pro, and it didn’t work well at all: light on but no blinking lights. Yet that certainly had been working before I changed switches. And in fact the Pro was connected to the net. Now what? But of course that’s simple. The Pro, formerly connected through the Ethernet, found itself disconnected from the net and connected through the Airport wireless; once connected it saw no need to connect through the Ethernet again.

Of course I can’t leave it alone. Now I have been trying to get the D-Link DGS 2205 Gigabit Switch, which also has a printed label “green Ethernet” on it, to work. It’s clearly new switch, probably one bought for me by Eric when we used the switch connecting Robert’s system to the network, as the entry point for TRENDnet 500 Mbps Compact Powerline AV Adapters which use the house power lines to connect to the back room where my TV set, which has TV input Cable but no Internet, resides. Getting an Ethernet line back there has been a problem for years, and the TRENDnet devices work so I can now use the Internet to find content for my TV. More on that another time.

But the “green Ethernet” D-link switch doesn’t seem to want to work, making me wonder whether it was a bad cable after all? In any event her system works, and all is well. And home networks still take troubleshooting.

My problem is, why do my older D-Link switches work just fine, but the newer “green Ethernet” switch doesn’t – any why did it suddenly stop working after weeks of doing everything well? I’ll figure it out.

I’ve now heard the Reese Witherspoon arrest tape, and it’s pretty clear that Atlanta would be far better off without that particular police officer. When I grew up, the police were the friends of the citizens. They weren’t looking for reasons to make arrests, they were supposed to keep the peace. When I was growing up our local deputy sheriff would have been more interested in preventing Witherspoon’s husband from driving drunk than in arresting a pushy blonde. This one was determined to make certain that Witherspoon and husband were subjects, not citizens.

The parts of the arrest audio being broadcast make the policemen sound more reasonable than he was; you have to listen to it all, otherwise it makes is sound as if she’s just a pushy blonde. Which she was, but that’s not illegal. The policeman was insisting that she get back in her car, as if she were some kind of danger to him, which again it is clear she was not. Of course we can think of similar situations which would have looked like a danger to the policemen. This wasn’t one of them.

This is a result of the crazy insistence on equality. If everyone has to be treated equally, then everyone has to be treated as a potential cop-killer contemptuous of the police and the society; and of course if everyone is treated that way, more and more will find that they may as well be hung for being a sheep instead of a lamb, and a few will figure out that if they act as wolves they may well not be hung at all.

I don’t know of a real solution to this problem. I do know where it ends. Social orders have been down that road before.

Freedom is not free.  Free men are not equal.  Equal men are not free. And having said all that, we do not know how to deal with real inequalities – of civility, of ability, of moral value – among citizens. We don’t really even have a theory.

Gelzinis: The deadly sound silence can make,

Jerry

When the lawyers start whining about how unfair it is to prosecute the Boston bombers’ friends – the ones who went into the apartment and tried to throw evidence away – one should consider this piece:

http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/columnists/peter_gelzinis/2013/05/gelzinis_the_deadly_sound_silence_can_make

Sobering.

Ed